The present disclosure relates to an operating device used in color designation upon executing color correction or the like, and to an image processing apparatus that includes this operating device.
Devices capable of color printing are common among image forming apparatuses such as copying machines and multi-function peripherals (MFPs). This type of image forming apparatus implements color printing by combining recording agents such as toner or ink of the four colors of cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K), for example.
Many of such image forming apparatuses have a function for performing color correction on image data. Color correction includes correction to approximate a color to be corrected included in an image to a specific target color. The printing of images containing photographs, etc. has been done in recent years. Accordingly, in response to demand for changing the hue to a color felt preferable to people, such a color correction function has come to be built into image forming apparatuses. As a specific example of making the hue change to a color that a person feels preferable, there is color correction to reproduce a so-called memory color. The memory color, for example, is a color such as the skin of a person, the blue of the sky, the green of vegetation, and the red of the sunset, and is a color obtained so as to reproduce a color close to the color remembered by humans, which makes it more desirable than performing reproduction of a color faithfully from a document.
For such memory colors, there are individual differences in the preferred colors. For this reason, various techniques for adequately providing preferred colors in image forming apparatuses have been proposed.
For example, an image processing apparatus has been known that allows for a user to select his or her preferred color correction and that reflects this color correction in image processing, by printing color adjusted images consisting of a plurality of thumbnail images between which the color shade is varied slightly and allowing the user to input a number specifying a thumbnail image selected from among the printed color adjusted images.
In addition, a technology has been known that allows a user to select a color correction condition by displaying on the same screen a plurality of images generated by executing different color corrections on the same image, and allowing the user to select from these images.
With the aforementioned technology, so long as the preferred color correction is included among the suggested color correction candidates, the user will be able to easily select this color correction. However, if the preferred color correction is not included among the suggested color correction candidates, complicated operation and the like will be necessary in order to obtain the preferred color correction, and the user will not be able to easily set the desired color correction.